Flash plugins again...

I happen to be in the possession of the SWF File Format Specification Version 10. What does that mean?

Has it been released to the public or did I just stuble across it illegaly?

Is it meaningless in the sense that it only describes the file format itself, not like how to interpret what it is supposed to do?

Can we use it to finally write a proper flash plugin or atleast a stream extractor?

A genuine full fledged working flash plugin for MUI-OWB would be very nice.

@Denill

I know stupid question but did you try to compile SWFdec from the Fab source ?

Recently I asked kas1e about Gnash but he say that doing a plugin around it isn't so easy, but maybe just maybe porting SWFdec for beginning would be ...

Isn't SWFdec very old and only able to display like ads and stuff? And no, I have't tried that...

What I want is a plugin (or something) that can take some args and make a streaming URL from it that MPlayer can use.

Swfdec is about the same as Gnash regarding compatibility (sometimes better, sometimes worse). On the other hand, it's better designed than Gnash for plugin usage. Gnash was just insane in that regard (they did some work on that, since, but it's still insane for other reasons, Boost usage being one of them).

As for your Flash10 specs, they're public, and they won't help you a lot to retrieve stream urls, unless you write an intepreter for ActionScript 3. In practice, most Flash video players (youtube & co) play an external media (URL being computed by the flash app in various ways), so you're out of luck if you plan to extract the media from the swf file. :)

@Fab

Well, I didn't expect to be able to extract the media from a 100kB swf file :)

Many sites, only hides the URL in some js code so you can bypass flash completely. But other sites seem to generate the URL within the running flash file. So basically I would like to be able to "run" a swf file enough to make it spit out that damn URL :) In stand-alone mode or as a plugin.

So, instead of doing like a real plugin would do, i.e. play the file inside itself on its own surface, it would instead just print the URL and stop, or possible save the stream to disk.

Isn't that what you already have btw??

The author of getVideo says he sometimes has to start a PC and capture the TCP stream while the flash is running. This is exactly what I want to be able to avoid.

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And for that, you need to implement a great part of the ActionScript 3 interpreter (if you want to deal with all these players requiring Flash9/10, that is). So it will be quite some work, the same the other Flash implementations struggle with.

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Well, the swfdec plugin is more than an ad viewer, you know. It does all that and more (upto Flash8, unfortunately).

Playing the media in the browser or just displaying the direct link is the easy part. In the swfdec plugin, i use ffmpeg to play the file (instead of gstreamer originally used in swfdec), and i also show the streamed URLs in a resource window accessible from the plugin area contextmenu. Besides, the plugin uses the browser network infrastructure, so the streamed URLs also appears in network activity window, anyway.

Anyway, there's no shortcut for what you want to achieve. Whatever you do, you need an ActionScript 3 interpreter able to run your swf file. And since this task is already a huge work, why would you stop at interpreting and not poursuing with rendering then ? :)

@Fab

Ok, I'll drop this then. How annoying. (Only decoding a RECT took me all evening last night btw... What a terribly obnoxious way of storing data!)

Different approach: Some sites offer to switch to HTML5. Would that be an easier alternative?

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Sites providing HTML5 mode (youtube, dailymotion, vimeo, ...) make it easy to retrieve the media source, since it's merely <video|audio src="blah"> tag. To be noted some sites protect that somewhat with cookies and/or referrers.

Also to be noted that with the help of userscripts, you can do a bit like getvideo does, retrieve media URLs and then you can add direct links to the page itself. For instance, i do that for Youtube when the video isn't available as HTML5 mode (yet), as well as removing the Flash element and adding a video element instead (which looks like that in the end: http://fabportnawak.free.fr/owbshots/ ... player-youtube-script.png ).

@Fab

Cool!
I can very well live with watching videos in a stand-alone player though. then I can move it, resize, do another search etc. while its playing and without messing with the size/pos of the browser.

But all in all I'm getting pretty tired of not being able to watch anything but youtube and vimeo... :( Friends send links, or come visit and want to show something but it never works. Quite sad Ppl don't want to visit me because I have a "boring" computer that can't play videos or play online games or stream spotify etc...

I'm living even in a boring country where Spotify cannot be used even with the most exiting computer (which is Amiga anyway ;) )

nexus

@Deniil
There's nothing wrong with having a Windows/Mac/Linux machine to handle the cases where AmigaOS can't do something (yet)...

And if you have FileZilla set-up on it. then you can access it's files from your Amiga. I use FolderSync2 to keep all my data files synchronised between both PC & Amiga, so that I never have a reason to NOT use my Amiga (for something it is capable of doing).

EDIT: While FileZilla works on all 3 mentioned OSes, FolderSync2 only supports Windows at the moment (although you could possibly use WINE to run it on Linux).